August 31, 2009
States which do well educationally, blame Canada! permlink
Category: Culture
Mike the Mad Biologist points out that Massachusetts, New Jersey, Minnesota and New Hampshire do better on math scores for elementary age students than most of Europe, and are competitive with Asia. Here are Mike's factors for why this might...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 2:26 PM • 30 Comments •
Quest for Antarctica permlink
Category: Blog
Over at Living the Scientific Life an update on the quest to go to Antarctica. Turns out you can "reassign" your vote. Also, if you haven't voted, please do. Again: Voting ends at noon EDT on 30 September 2009, and...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 4:47 AM • •
Hispanics more religious, not that zealous permlink
Category: Culture
A few months ago I pointed out that minorities don't oppose gay marriage, blacks do. Specifically, there are sometimes assumptions that Hispanics are extremely religious Roman Catholics characterized by very socially conservative views. From what I have seen the data...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 4:14 AM • 0 Comments •
Chimps, humans, and allopatry permlink
Category: Anthroplogy
Thomas Mailmund is going ape over chimps & humans again, Patterns of autosomal divergence between the human and chimpanzee genomes support an allopatric model of speciation. A review of a paper of the same name....
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:32 AM • 0 Comments •
Africans, disease, history and ecology permlink
Category: Anthroplogy
Interesting review paper on disease and Sub-Saharan African, Neglected Tropical Diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa: Review of Their Prevalence, Distribution, and Disease Burden: The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are the most common conditions affecting the poorest 500 million people living in...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:16 AM • 3 Comments •
Thirst, Korean vampires at work & play permlink
Category: Culture
I saw Thirst this weekend, a Korean film about a Catholic priest turned vampire. I was expecting strangeness, but it was really strange. The female lead, Kim Ok-bin gave a pretty good performance that I found very memorable. My friend...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:07 AM • 3 Comments •
New "language gene"? permlink
Category: Genetics
Anthropology.net points me to a new paper, Convergent genetic linkage and associations to language, speech and reading measures in families of probands with Specific Language Impairment: We analyzed genetic linkage and association of measures of language, speech and reading phenotypes...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:01 AM • 2 Comments •
August 30, 2009
Uighuristan as the New World permlink
Category: Culture
From page 55 of Empires of the Silk Road: ...Archaeology has shown that every location in Eurasia where Indo-European daughter languages have come to be spoken, modern humans had already settled there long beforehand, with the sole exception of the...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 10:47 PM • 0 Comments •
Pots, people & seeds permlink
Category: Culture
There's a new paper in PLoS ONE, Craniometric Data Supports Demic Diffusion Model for the Spread of Agriculture into Europe. That's fine. There are two extreme models about how farming might have spread in Europe. One model suggests that farmers...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 2:43 AM • 2 Comments •
August 29, 2009
West Eurasian population substructure + the Baloch permlink
Category: Genetics
Dienekes points me to a new paper, European Population Genetic Substructure: Further Definition of Ancestry Informative Markers for Distinguishing Among Diverse European Ethnic Groups. You've seen this song & dance before: Population substructure in Japan Population substructure of Mexican Mestizos...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 9:01 AM • 0 Comments •